如何在cordova ios应用程序中禁用NSURL缓存？

Question

I'm developing a cordova 4 ios app. After a security scan, it was recommended that I should disable NSURL caching in order to avoid the creation of the Cache.db file on the devices.

Is there a way to achieve this? I've tried this plugin https://github.com/wongatech/cordova-disable-nsurl-cache but it is not working (it says that it works for cordova 3.7).

Is it a wise thing to completely avoid this NSURL caching or should it be performed just for some request, lets say, the ones with 'sensitive' data?

Help anyone?

Answer 1

I don't know anything about Cordova, but assuming it uses NSURLConnection or NSURLSession under the hood, and assuming it is possible to add native code, you can disable NSURLConnection caching like this:

NSURLCache *URLCache =
    [[NSURLCache alloc] initWithMemoryCapacity:4194304 // 4 MB
                                  diskCapacity:0
                                      diskPath:nil];
[NSURLCache setSharedURLCache:URLCache];

For NSURLSession, you would need to change the session configuration's URLCache property to the URL cache object you created (instead of doing the second line above). That would presumably require changes to Cordova itself if it uses NSURLSession.

With that said, I have no idea whether that will work or not with Cordova. They might use their own networking code instead, in which case you'd have to disable caching in some manner specific to Cordova.

As for the avoiding URL caching question, again assuming it is using NSURLConnection or NSURLSession, the easiest way to avoid caching anything sensitive is to always use POST requests for sending sensitive data, because those results are never cached.

For that matter, even if Cordova uses its own networking code, non-cachability of POST requests should be enforced by pretty much any standards-compliant web cache, so that's probably a fairly safe bet.